How much tea is too much to drink in a day?

I don't mean this to be a bragging thread but sometimes I'll drink 6-8, 8 ounce glasses of tea in a day either hot or iced starting in the morning until the evening.

Is this too much tea to drink in a day?

I eat regular balanced meals and I do drink a lot of water as well too. I don't drink tea, or even coffee in place of a meal like a friend of mine sometimes does.

These are caffinated black and green teas. However it's not like drinking a large amount of coffee like 6-8 or more 8oz cups as your heart does not race and your blood pressure does not go up or at least my heart does not race and my blood pressure does not go up with drinking this much tea. My sleep cycle is not effected and sometimes a black or green tea very early in the evening during or after dinner, and not past 6PM makes me relaxed enough to go to sleep.

Last edited by ClarG on Jan 18th, '14, 21:17, edited 2 times in total.

Probably mostly how strong you brew it. I've had two occassions in my life where I've had to cut back on my tea consumption. One was during a period that I was making my own "tea syrup" for making iced tea at work. I was brewing it so super strong, and not diluting it enough when I mixed it later on, that the caffeine was giving me chest pains.

The other time was during a period where the only tea I had accessible was NOT brewed by me, and again, was horribly over-steeped (prepared in a coffee urn with giant teabags that were left in all day). Even a single cup in the morning gave me horrible insomnia for some reason.

When I'm brewing my tea for best flavor, I have no issues with such things though

When I'm brewing my tea for best flavor, I have no issues with such things though

Exactly. I brew my tea fairly dilute compared to many here. When I used to drink a tea/mate blend for all-nighters before exams, there was definitely a physiologic limit. As I brew regular teas from C sinensis today, no problem with 2-3 or more liters.

Blends from the Asda Smartprice, Tesco Value, Morrisons Value and Sainsbury's Basics range were found to have an average of six milligrammes (mg) per litre.In comparison, branded black blends such as PG Tips, Twining's and Typhoo were found to have an average of 3.3 mg per litre, the study found.Pure blends Oolong and Pu'er teas were found to have the lowest concentrations of fluoride - an average of 0.7 mg per litre

A 47-year-old Michigan woman developed a bone disease rarely seen in the U.S. after she drank a pitcher of tea made from at least 100 tea bags daily, for 17 years, researchers report.

The Detroit woman visited the doctor after experiencing pain in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years.

X-rays revealed areas of very dense bone on the spinal vertebrae and calcifications of ligaments in her arm, said study researcher Dr. Sudhaker D. Rao, a physician at Henry Ford Hospital who specializes in endocrinology and bone and mineral metabolism.

The researchers suspected the woman had skeletal fluorosis, a bone disease caused by consuming too much fluoride (a mineral found in tea as well as drinking water).

The patient's blood levels of fluoride were four times higher than what would be considered normal, the researchers said.

Skeletal fluorosis is endemic in regions of the world with naturally high levels of fluoride in drinking water, including some parts of India and China, but is rare in Europe and North America. (Low levels of fluoride are added to drinking water in the United States to prevent cavities, but aren't high enough to cause fluorosis.)

Rao said the patient was originally referred to him because her doctors suspected she had cancer, which can also show up on an X-ray as areas of dense bone. But because Rao had seen cases of skeletal fluorosis in his native India, "I was able to recognize it immediately," he said.

Excess fluoride is typically eliminated from the body by the kidneys, Rao said. But if one consumes a lot of it, as this patient did through tea drinking, over time, the fluoride forms crystal deposits on bone, Rao said.

A few other cases of skeletal fluorosis caused by tea drinking have been reported in the United States. In these cases, patients typically drank a gallon of tea a day, Rao said. Rao and colleagues instructed their patient to stop drinking tea, after which she experienced an improvement in symptoms. The fluoride deposits will gradually go away as the bone remodels (or repairs) itself, a process that occurs frequently in the body, Rao said.

That article has been posted before, but there are several things to keep in mind:

1. 100 teabags is likely 150-300 grams of tea if not more.2. those tea leaves are highly broken up, which causes everything to leach quicker.3. the leaves in tea bags are typically more mature than the leaves purchased for loose leaf teas. More mature leaves tend to have a higher flouride content than the younger leaves.

There are likely others that I am missing but simply looking into those, I am not sure there is anyone on the forum who on a regular basis goes through even 150 grams of tea a day on any sort of regular basis. Because for the most part we get multiple steeps and drink leaves to completion, which mitigates certain items like the amount of flouride or other nutrients we can get from the tea leaves. Adding the other two into the mix is just adding insult to injury.

Again that is not to say that you can and should always drink more tea, but similar articles can be written for nearly any food item in which one person takes it to an extreme. For instance people who eat nothing but carrots for months on end can develop an unnatural skin color.

It probably has been said in this thread before: Somethings are bad in relatively small amounts, other things are healthy in large amounts, but everything has the point to where it can become dangerous.